Cathy Benedict

Cathy Benedict joined the music education faculty at Western University, starting July 2015 as faculty and Director of Research. She has taught undergraduate and graduate classes such as Elementary Pedagogy, Orff, Curriculum Design, Critical Readings in Music Education and Music Education and Special Needs Students. She has presented multiple workshops to both national and international audiences on topics as varied as pedagogy and pride, thinking transitions rather than classroom management, the interrogation of classroom rules as policy, the social contract and utopian visions, and music in the elementary classroom and integrated practices. Her scholarly interests lay in facilitating music education environments in which students take on the perspective of a justice-oriented citizen, to this end her research agenda focuses on the processes of education and the ways in which teachers and students interrogate taken-for-granted, normative practices. Cathy has published in such journals as Philosophy of Music Education Review, Music Education Research, and Research Studies in Music Education, the Brazilian journal ABEM, co-edited the journal Theory Into Practice and the 2012 National Society for the Study of Education Yearbook (Teachers College Press), and most recently co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice and Music Education (Oxford University Press).